


Some Turn To Dust Or To Gold

by paperclipbitch



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Community: writerverse, F/M, Gen, Gen Prompt Bingo, SHIELD Academy, all fics should be about trip, friends to lovers to friends, i just love trip so much, legacy babies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-06
Updated: 2014-11-06
Packaged: 2018-02-24 07:28:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2573204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Let me guess,” Sharon Carter says, “my aunt was your kind of weird jack-off material back in the day, and you think I’d like to know that.  Or, hey, you’re pretty sure banging me gets you one step closer to actually being Captain America.”  </p><p>Antoine can’t help screwing up his face.  “People say that to you?”</p><p>“The first one,” she shrugs.  “The second one I’ve extrapolated.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Turn To Dust Or To Gold

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt _affinity_ at LJ's **writerverse** and the prompt _past, present and future_ for DW's **gen_prompt bingo**.
> 
> [Title from _Centuries_ by Fall Out Boy.] Originally I wanted to write this for **writerverse** ’s quick fic the other week (for the prompt _you looked too small in their big, black car to be a threat to the men in power_ \- Kate Bush), but the words didn’t come fast enough, so, have it now. I actually mostly just want these two to be forever bros, but I do ship it a bit too, which is how this came about. 
> 
> Three relevant bits of information for this fic:  
> 1\. We don’t know for certain that Gabe Jones is Trip’s granddad, but I needed a name.  
> 2\. Peggy Carter and Gabe Jones totes dated in canon.  
> 3\. I have probably screwed up the timeline a bit and maybe some SHIELD Academy details; that’s on me, sorry.

**i.**

Tomorrow’s classes and courses and practicals will feature incredibly hungover SHIELD students, if the way they’re drinking tonight is any indication. This isn’t anything new, but it makes it awkward as Antoine threads his way through the crush of bodies that are starting to slide from happy noise to pointless drunken raucousness. The students know enough to keep their hands to themselves – don’t grope someone in a bar full of trainee assassins, or people who’ll have no compunction about snapping fingers, without at least _asking_ – but there’s still a _lot_ of them, some of them waving at Antoine as he passes, slopping shitty beer onto his shirt.

At the bar is the woman he’s looking for, drinking from a bottle with lime wedged in the top. She’s in jeans and a shirt with just enough buttons undone to be suggestive without it being an invitation, golden hair falling out of a messy ponytail, neatly manicured nails tapping absently against the label of her beer. She’s hot, he may as well notice that, but that isn’t why he asked around and found her preferred drinking spot.

Okay, if he’s honest – which he shouldn’t be, because honesty is the _first_ damn thing they try and stamp out of you at SHIELD Academy – Antoine isn’t completely sure why he’s tracked her down. Which should make for a fun opening conversation gambit, at least.

He slides in easily between her and the skinny guy on her right who, even though Antoine can’t hear him talking over the slamming beat of whatever the crappy music in here is, is clearly demonstrating what he learned about long distance kill shots and wind speed, his hands waving in the air. Antoine sat through that seminar too; laugh a minute.

“Hey,” he says, loud enough to get noticed, not loud enough to make her jump.

The woman twists on her barstool and appraises Antoine silently with bright dark eyes. The friend she was talking to rolls her eyes, expression resigned, and turns her attention to her margarita.

“Let me guess,” Sharon Carter says, “my aunt was your kind of weird jack-off material back in the day, and you think I’d like to know that. Or, hey, you’re pretty sure banging me gets you one step closer to actually being Captain America.” 

Antoine can’t help screwing up his face. “People say that to you?”

“The first one,” she shrugs. “The second one I’ve extrapolated.”

“Damn,” Antoine says. “Also, uh, I wasn’t going to say either of those things, for the record.”

“What, you wanted to buy me a drink first?” Sharon arches an eyebrow, expression still sharp, but Antoine can’t exactly blame her. There’s a reason that he keeps his own family a secret, after all. Walking into this school where the halls ring with her aunt’s name, a name Sharon bears herself – it has consequences.

“I actually wanted to talk to you,” Antoine tells her, aware, even as the words leave his mouth, that it sounds lame.

Sharon tips her head to one side, expression slightly less acerbic, but barely. “I’m not going to discredit your frankly great arms and a very charming smile you’ve got going on there, but I’m not really in the mood to spend my night telling you stories you already know from the billion movies they’ve already made about Peggy Carter.”

Antoine swallows down a laugh, because it’s not like he hasn’t heard every last thing that was wrong or right about pretty much all of those damn movies.

“That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about,” he replies.

Sharon Carter’s mouth twists. “So, what _did_ you want to talk to me about?” she asks.

Antoine leans in, not too close, just close enough that Sharon’s the only one to catch the five words he says.

She leans back, expression melting into something entirely different. “Well,” she says, “that changes the odds.”

**ii.**

“It’s not the same,” Sharon says, waving her chopsticks at him. Sundays are a day off at the Academy; technically, you’re supposed to want to spend them training and researching _anyway_ , but sometimes it’s great just to go for dim sum like the normal people they never were and never will be. 

“Because people are too lazy and racist to remember that there were black Howling Commandos and that they had names?” Antoine responds, tone light, because this isn’t an argument. It could be, but it isn’t.

“Well, yes,” Sharon cedes, tipping her head to one side. “And your mom got married and you don’t carry your grandfather’s name.”

“You could’ve enrolled under someone else’s name,” Antoine offers, aware even as he says it that it’s a ridiculous suggestion; the truth outs anyway, and they spend enough time at SHIELD living false lives without overcomplicating things.

Sharon’s arched eyebrow tells him exactly what she things of _that_ , and she leans over to steal the last of the pork buns. She looks as tired as all of them do at the end of a hard week of seminars and training and late nights and early mornings in the gym, but she wears it well, even though Antoine knows she hasn’t done any laundry for about three weeks and she’s started washing her hair with shower gel because she hasn’t had time to go shopping for amenities.

It’s cool, though: the girl across the hall from Antoine’s been stealing the dish soap from their communal kitchen for _her_ hair and is hoping that no one’s going to notice. Things that seemed important before SHIELD Academy crack and split a little after the first semester; your mind and body are so exhausted and brutally determined to keep going that as long as you have a horizontal surface to sleep on and some kind of regular nutrition then you tend to stop caring about everything else. Antoine took a week of cold showers once before he even realised that he actually had the option to turn the switch toward hot.

“You get to hide in plain sight,” Sharon says, when she’s sipped her green tea and thought about it for a while. 

“Pretty sure my mom wants me to get it tattooed on my chest,” Antoine says, on an awkward shrug. He likes that his mom’s proud of her dad, and of what he achieved, but it can be embarrassing. He’d like it not to be, but, hey, there you have it.

Sharon laughs, leans back in her chair. “So you signed up for her, huh?”

“I promised my granddad I’d have nothing to do with SHIELD,” Antoine admits, gaze on his chopsticks. “But my mom’s the one who’s still alive and she was always much better at emotional blackmail than he was.” He smiles, because it sounds worse when he puts it like that, and that’s a disservice to them all. Still: it was clear he was never going to get a choice in the matter. He tips his chin toward Sharon. “What about you?”

“Pretty sure my aunt just wants me here to spy on what SHIELD are telling the new kids,” Sharon says wryly. “She’ll never let go, and hey, why should she?”

“And what did you want?” Antoine asks, because he can’t stop himself. He’s only known Sharon a couple of weeks, and they’re still figuring out each other’s boundaries, whatever shreds of privacy SHIELD will let them keep.

“I don’t know.” Sharon’s smile is honest, and just a little tired. “You know how some kids grow up and their parents and their grandparents were doctors, so they know that that’s what they’re going to do? That was me. I was always going to come here. It runs in the family.”

Antoine tries not to listen to the gossip that spreads ridiculously through the Academy. Their future lives will be spent in the space between rumours and hearsay and legends, and it seems like the students practice for it now by whispering behind each other’s backs. They talk about Sharon Carter a lot, of course, because she’s an easy target, someone everyone knows well enough to pin their accusations to. It’s obvious that crueller students want to believe Sharon got in because of her aunt and for no other reason: favouritism, nepotism, whatever you want to call it, while the rest of them struggled and strained and stayed up most nights to even qualify to take the entrance exam. Antoine doesn’t believe the hype, though: he spent a sparring session with Sharon after one of their self-defence practicals, and he’s pretty sure his ribs still haven’t recovered.

 _Hey_ , he’d said that first night, nervous in the cold night air while Sharon watched him with that appraising expression she wears all too often, _I think you might be the first person I’ve met who might actually get this._

Her mouth had twisted, darkly amused and self-deprecating. _What, the external pressure or the internal pressure?_

He’d laughed, because: yeah, that.

Sharon knocks their knees together under the table, reaching to pour more tea. “There are worse things,” she says. “We could be wondering _why_ we’re putting ourselves through all this.”

**iii.**

Spring Break for SHIELD students is not the same as Spring Break for everyone else in the country, but they still get some time off and when Sharon invites Antoine to come and visit her he doesn’t hesitate. Antoine is aware that plenty of their classmates are wondering what exactly he has to make Sharon Carter act like something other than a bitch to him, but he’s not going to tell them that, aside from being a legacy kid himself, he’s been treating her as something other than a museum piece. 

Sharon’s apartment is small but nice, with a comfy couch for him to sleep on and a set of photographs on the wall of Peggy Carter, Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes and the rest of the Commandos that aren’t in the public domain. Antoine picks out his grandfather’s laughing face, and even after years of seeing all the old pictures and the most recent action movie where Will Smith played Gabe Jones, even after all that, he still can’t get over how _young_ he looks.

On the third day, over morning coffee, Sharon drops: “do you want to come and see my aunt with me?”

Antoine’s going to be a SHIELD agent one of these days, provided the training doesn’t actually kill him, so he manages not to choke. He swallows a little too hard and says: “are you sure?”

Sharon tips her head, a little sheepish. “She’d like to meet you, actually, but I figured I’d pretend I’d given you the illusion of choice.”

Antoine tries not to feel too ridiculous that he brought a backpack of jeans and t-shirts with him and now he’s got to go and see Peggy Carter and none of it feels suitable, smart enough. He should have a suit at least, he thinks.

“She’s not your prom date,” Sharon says mildly, looking at him through the open bathroom door where he’s shaving.

“So no one ever gets starstruck when meeting your aunt?” he asks, and arches an eyebrow at her in the mirror.

She laughs. “Oh my god, you should’ve seen Obama’s face. His was my favourite.”

Peggy Carter still lives in the apartment she retired to when she finally got too old to help out with SHIELD – though she’s one of the few people with a direct line to Nick Fury whatever happens, or so the rumour goes – with a team of nurses to look after her. It’s not the same as when Antoine’s granddad was fading out in hospital, with cancer getting to what the Nazis couldn’t touch, but he feels it somewhere in his chest, that these people saved the world once and now they’re all drifting away in narrow beds where no one wants to look at them.

“You okay?” Sharon asks quietly, fingers catching his wrist. Antoine swallows everything down, and nods. Sharon squeezes before she lets go, and goes to ask one of the nurses if her aunt is up for visitors today, if she’s lucid enough for company.

The room is quiet, with a television on mute and a neat stack of books on the nightstand, a vase of pretty flowers beside them. Photographs are scattered around the room, of Peggy’s friends and family; Antoine thinks he catches a glimpse of a much younger Sharon’s gap-toothed smile. Peggy herself is propped up in her bed, face deeply lined and hair bullet grey, but her eyes are bright and alive and her smile is warm and real.

“Ms Carter,” he says, stepping over to the bed when Sharon pokes him in the back, “it’s, uh, it’s an honour to meet you.”

He feels wrong-footed, uncool and delighted and shy all at once, and Peggy Carter’s expression says that she understands, and that he’s not the first.

“You’ve inherited Gabe’s smile,” she says, and holds out a thin hand for him to shake.

Most people, when they learn who Antoine’s grandfather was, comment on how different he looks, like they’re disappointed he’s not a blueprint, a copy they could hold up next to their plastic limited edition action figure and feel they’d gotten a good deal. And he’s been fine with not looking like Gabe Jones, with struggling to be someone he’s not always sure how to be, to accept a mantle he isn’t sure his shoulders can bear, and then there’s Peggy Carter with her sharp eyes looking into him and through and he isn’t completely sure what to do with all this.

“We should have met before now,” she adds, “though I’ll admit it’s been a while since I’ve seen your mother. Thank her for the pie she sent at Thanksgiving, won’t you?”

Antoine just _stares_ and behind him, he hears Sharon laugh.

**iv.**

The Science and Technology Academy has a gigantic hall that can be filled with a hologram of space. It’s kind of like the planetariums they were dragged to for school field trips, except that it contains planets and star systems that haven’t been officially discovered by NASA yet, and it’s 3D in the sense that it surrounds you and you can reach out when you want and feel a star tremble under your fingertips.

Basically: it’s really, really cool, and nobody who isn’t a scientist is allowed in.

Still, they’re all set to become SHIELD agents one day, who are supposed to be able to infiltrate – or straight-up break in – to anywhere on the planet if that becomes necessary, and everyone gets their practice by sneaking onto each other’s campuses. Antoine lets the guy on the third floor believe that he’s carrying on the lengthy and traditional SHIELD Academy Cross-Specialists Prank War so that he can get the latest user codes for the star grid, and the rest after that is pretty damn easy. He’ll just have to rearrange a couple of constellations or something on his way out to cover his tracks.

Sharon arrives fifteen minutes after Antoine does, bearing a bottle of wine. She pauses in the doorway, looking up at the scattered stars, and a grin spreads slowly over her face.

“Haven’t you been here before?” Antoine asks, as she climbs the stairs toward him.

“Last time I was on this campus I was filling their petri dishes with shaving foam, I think,” Sharon responds, and sits down beside him, passing him the wine.

“And how’d that go?” he asks as he picks the paperclips out of his pocket that he put in earlier so they wouldn’t have to bring a frankly quite suspicious corkscrew with them.

“Remember that time when they set up our indoor sprinkler system so it wouldn’t shut off for two days?” Sharon says, as Antoine twists the paperclips into hooks. There wasn’t _technically_ a seminar on Official SHIELD Ways To Avoid Needing A Corkscrew, but it’s everyone’s favourite non-lethal hobby.

“That seems… disproportionate,” he remarks.

“We may have also set some booby-traps,” Sharon admits, ducking her head.

Antoine laughs, and manages to uncork the wine. They might leave the cork behind later, just to remind the scientists that their security systems aren’t as all-encompassing as they might like, but this isn’t technically about pissing off other Academy students. Antoine’s not entirely sure what it’s about, but it’s definitely not about other people.

He’s noticed, of course, the string of something between him and Sharon that isn’t just that they both grew up with legends for family members, isn’t just that they’re at SHIELD Academy trying not to drop out or let anybody down, whether that anybody is their family or the collective cultural consciousness, isn’t just that they both struggle sometimes with their place in the world. Even if he was oblivious to it on a personal level, Antoine is being trained to read things in people that they’re not aware of themselves, to spot whether someone is really going to pull a trigger or not, if they’re lying to your face or believe that what they’re saying is the truth. If he _didn’t_ notice the way their distances are shrinking, the way their evenings are filling up with matching socialisation, he probably deserves to wash out.

“This definitely isn’t about that time my aunt and your granddad dated,” Sharon says later, sprawled on her back with the stars reflecting in her eyes and her hair pooled golden around her. They’ve run out of wine, but that’s probably for the best; Antoine has to get up and run through an assault course in about five hours, emphasis on the _assault_.

“Wait,” he says, “what?” 

Sharon giggles and covers her face with her hands, and he leans down to pull them away from her face. 

“If that was you trying to hit on me, that was _appalling_ ,” he tells her. “Just for future reference.”

Sharon blinks up at him, eyes pools of darkness filled with reflected lights, a grin quirking her lips because he hasn’t pulled away yet.

“Okay then, Mister Smooth,” she says, “tell me how you’re going to hit on me?”

“Well,” he says, “it’s not going to involve any of our family members or some kind of weird implication that we’re just repeating history all over again.”

Sharon blinks up at him. “Sounds good to me,” she says, and later, Antoine isn’t sure which of them moved first.

Sharon kisses like he’s always thought she would kiss, putting thought into it and not putting thought into it and trying _not_ to think about it because maybe this was meant for something else. Her mouth is soft and it opens under his, but there’s no romance heroine acquiescing, and he likes that, because Sharon folds and gives for no one, possibly wouldn’t even know how to start. She bites his lower lip and slides her tongue into his mouth, and he slips a little, hands sliding where they’re braced on the hall floor. She laughs and he tastes it, and above them the planets spin obliviously on.

**v.**

The showers stalls at the Academy were not built to contain two people. Lots of students choose to believe this is because the anti-fraternisation rules start early – you don’t want to be stuck on a team when you get to SHIELD with half the people you slept with while you were still training – but Antoine’s pretty sure it’s so that they’ll choose to get creative instead. If your job is eventually going to result in you needing to climb through ventilation shafts and tunnels and other enclosed spaces, then you should really get good at eating your girlfriend out while in a space little bigger than a coffin.

They’re careful, of course; meticulously careful. SHIELD doesn’t actually dose the water with birth control chemicals, but it politely and firmly suggests that all female students and employees pick a form of contraception they like and then ensure that they’re firmly drugged up, and condoms are freely available from everywhere. SHIELD would absolutely like to make sure that nobody gets knocked up on its watch: it has brought you here to save the world in secret, not get pregnant halfway through your second year and drop out.

Antoine and Sharon have their own reasons for being extra careful, of course: the words _legacy babies_ are utterly terrifying and must be avoided at all costs. It’s more than just not wanting to be parents at this point in their lives; they’d get media attention whether they wanted it or not, secrets all out, and Antoine has no interest at all in fathering kids who will receive a combined dose of his and Sharon’s family neuroses. Talk about cursing your children.

Not that he’s thinking much about the kids they should definitely not be thinking about now, on his knees on the shower tiles, one of Sharon’s thighs over his shoulder, his mouth pressed to the damp heat of her cunt. Sharon is pressed to the back of the stall, the plumbing probably digging into her spine, while neither of them benefit much from the shitty water pressure as the spray trickles over them both. Antoine has one hand bracing himself against the floor – there could be some really embarrassing accidents here, and he refuses to report to medical with something fractured because he was having sex in the shower – and one on Sharon’s ass, half steadying her, half pressing her cunt harder into his face because she doesn’t have the hip leverage to do it herself. It’s a careful balancing act, and one that would probably impress their instructors, if this kind of thing would get them marks and not summarily kicked out.

“Antoine,” Sharon whispers, one hand pressed to her mouth, “Trip, Antoine- _fuck_ ,” and he snakes his tongue inside her, pressing his nose to her clit. He’s got his eyes shut because of the water and he’s working blind here, but her legs are shaking and that’s probably a good sign. “God, fuck, _Trip_.”

Did he mention that the shower blocks are communal? The stalls have doors you can close, but they don’t actually lock, and it would probably be quickly obvious to anyone coming anywhere near what they’re doing in here. That is slightly the point, actually, and there also aren’t that many private places to fuck on campus if both your respective roommates are in. This isn’t exactly private, but SHIELD wants them to be able to do stealth missions, and this is a stealth mission of a kind. Sharon keeps one hand over her mouth, trying to keep herself as quiet as possible, while the other covers one of her breasts, twisting the nipple in time with the flickering of Antoine’s tongue. This is _not_ their first rodeo, after all.

Despite the general belief that everyone at the Academy is sleeping with their classmates, rules be damned, Sharon is actually the first SHIELD student that Antoine has had sex with, and, frankly, it’s kind of amazing. They might both be bruised and grazed and sliced up from half their training courses, and sometimes they’re too tired to do more than lie on the bed and yawn at each other before succumbing to exhaustion, but they’re both hard-working communicators with a perfectionist streak, physically flexible and with stamina that can go on and on and _on_. It’s a pity they’re both usually too wiped out from classes to put that to its full use, but it’s an option, anyway. That’s even before Antoine registers that this is _Sharon_ ; funny and clever and sexy as all get-out, easily affectionate without it turning into something neither of them are ready for.

Which is why Antoine is jammed into a shower stall with her, trying to time his breathing in a way that won’t end with him suffocating or drowning, while Sharon shivers and shudders and twitches her hips against his face as much as she can with the terrible leverage. One of these days, one of them is going to break a wrist or get a concussion trying to do this, but for now Antoine slides his mouth until he can suck her clit hard, and catches the broken noise Sharon makes that nearly disappears under the running water. It doesn’t take much longer for Sharon to come, her whole body jerking in a way that would probably knock them both over if Antoine weren’t ready for it, shifting his weight accordingly, lapping at her cunt until she drops a hand to his hair to push him away.

“Fucking fuck,” she says softly, as he eases himself upright to wrap his arms around her, because there isn’t space for both of them to flop onto the floor of the cramped shower stall. He kisses her wet hair as she curls into his chest, all warm slick curves, and his dick twitches against her thigh, a reminder that it’s not time to extract themselves just yet.

One of Sharon’s hands, gun-calloused and strong-gripped, wraps around his cock. “We should really try fucking in that cleaning closet on the fourth floor,” she says, words blurred from the post-orgasm shakes.

“You actually got concussion from that,” Antoine says thickly, dropping his face into her shoulder when Sharon twists her wrist and the head of his cock brushes against her stomach.

“We’ll know better next time,” she says, and laughs messily until he catches her lips in a kiss.

**vi.**

Good things burn up and burn out.

Sharon sleeps in the passenger seat, her head against the window, while outside the car the rain pours down and the radio crackles between love songs that nobody wants to listen to. Antoine’s got a contact in the Science and Technology Academy who’s going to make it so his car radio can receive multiple stations that don’t contain terrible old songs or really trashy disco, but that’s going to have to wait until he gets back. For now, there’s the miles of wet roads, and Sharon dozing under his coat, sliding awake occasionally when he brakes or slows down, because SHIELD agents sleep with one eye open at all times.

That probably means that Nick Fury doesn’t sleep at _all_ , but that’s an old joke everyone gets out their system in the first week.

Later, they drink coffee in a gas station, Sharon’s hair crushed on one side, and bicker over whether they want M&Ms or Reece’s Pieces as snacks for the next stage of their journey. It’s not different, which is maybe the worst part, because something should be different, and nothing is.

About half an hour out, Antoine turns down the radio and says: “please do not tell my mom we ever dated.”

They’re not at the stage where they can talk about it too easily yet, still transitioning back from lovers to friends, which is less fun than the friends to lovers bit was and leaves them both a little awkward at the most unexpected of moments. They planned this trip after they broke up, though, so there’s no one to blame but themselves.

“Ashamed of me?” Sharon asks, a lilt to her mouth that would be teasing, if it were less tight.

“Please,” Antoine says, “you’re _Peggy Carter’s niece_. My mom will lock you in the basement until we agree to get married if she thinks she can get away with it.”

Sharon’s smile is almost rueful. “And there was me thinking we’d gotten away with not having to have Legacy Babies.”

“My mom is very determined,” Antoine says, leaving out the years where his grandfather couldn’t get work and the army wouldn’t acknowledge that the Howling Commandos ever existed and his mom went to school in secondhand shoes and nobody called her daddy a hero. She has every right to love her legacy and what it means, and maybe one of these days he’ll be less of a dick about it.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Sharon replies. She knows parts of the story anyway; what Antoine didn’t tell her, he’s pretty sure Peggy did.

“Do,” Antoine says, “mom doesn’t even _have_ a basement.”

They both laugh, longer and harder than is probably warranted, and it feels better than anything has in the weeks since _we should probably stop this_ , in the space they’ve had between them after _we were better friends then we were anything else_. He thinks Sharon probably misses the fucking _unbelievable_ sex just as much as he does, but it’s not time to ask just yet, and anyway, they both agreed that just because the sex was great it didn’t mean that it would make up for the mess of everything else.

Privately, Antoine is still wondering if that’s what Peggy and Gabe had to decide in the end, and if he’ll ever be brave enough to ask her. If maybe it’s better for them never to know just how close they got to recreating something already long gone.

Sharon shifts in her seat as the traffic breaks, fluffing up her hair and tugging it back into a serviceable ponytail, though her face speaks of the hours they spent driving. It’s not quite a roadtrip, but Sharon wants to meet his mom, and of course his mom wants to meet Sharon. Antoine’s not sure how he feels about all this, but that’s what you get for being the next generation: you don’t get to pick and choose your links, it’s all a lot bigger than you.

“How do I look?” Sharon asks, digging for chapstick in her purse, and Antoine realises a little later than he probably should that she’s _nervous_. Nervous for a dozen different reasons, some of which he doesn’t want to acknowledge; not yet, anyway.

“You look great,” he says, and: “she’s going to love you anyway.”

Sharon grins at him, wide and honest, and the rain outside starts to ease. There’s no rainbow, but hey; nothing’s perfect, after all.

**vii.**

They’re in their final year when the very early reports come in that they’ve found the vessel Captain America crashed in, buried in the ice. 

Most of the students immediately go to whoever is going to be able to get them the most classified information possible, or start hacking into the comms and locked information databases, but Trip grabs his car keys and is out of the Academy the moment the reports are confirmed.

When he tries to call Sharon, her phone is turned off. He tries a few times on the long drive home, and eventually she answers, sounding breathless and just a little shaky.

“You flew straight to be with your aunt, huh?” he says.

“And you’re driving home to be with your mom,” she replies.

Maybe they should both be staying with SHIELD while this greatest of triumphs unfurls, the culmination of decades of research and hope and technological advancement just trying to find this one little craft that crashed without trace. Maybe they should be with their classmates when whatever is found is brought to light. But there are some things that are more important than SHIELD, and this is one of them.

Of course, Peggy Carter was probably told about all this before they were, and will have the most up-to-date information of anybody; Nick Fury will see to that. Antoine’s mom hasn’t got the right to know anything at all, and this will probably stay classified for months, years, if not forever. And what he’s doing right now contravenes a lot of the legal papers they sign for every semester that they turn up for.

“I’ll keep you updated,” Sharon says, after a pause that goes on a little too long. “I mean, we probably won’t know anything for hours yet.”

“I know,” he says, because he does know, and it’s not like he can achieve anything by going home… except that he has to be there. He just has to.

“I hope you also know what you’re doing,” Sharon continues, her tone light, but firm. “It could get you killed.” That’s… uncomfortably true, actually, legacy kid or not. Antoine bites his lips together, because, yeah, that’s what happens when you betray SHIELD’s secrets, even if it’s just to your mom, your mom who deserves to know the truth here. And then he hears Sharon’s grin, even down the phoneline. “Or worse,” she adds, “expelled.”

His laugh bursts out of him almost unexpectedly, raw and real and a relief after what feels like hours of tension.

“I hate you, Sharon Carter,” he says. “You are terrible.”

“Hang in there,” she says, and the line goes dead.

Over the years, Antoine met all of his grandfather’s old friends, the various ex-Commandos who dropped by for Thanksgiving or Independence Day or just for beer on the back porch and shared memories they tried to put into words for Antoine, who’d sit, mesmerised as his granddad shaped wars with his hands, the tension still building even though he _knew_ that they’d made it out okay, that they were sitting right there in front of him telling him. He misses them, sometimes; these old men who one by one slid out of his life, while his mom put on another black dress for another lost godfather, an adopted uncle. He was too young to know them properly, not the way his mom did, but they sat him on their laps and told him about how brave his grandfather was, how great they knew he would be, and made him laugh and gasp in terror in equal amounts.

And because of all that, he also knew about the spaces; about the people who starred in half of those stories who weren’t there to repeat them. Neither Steve Rogers nor Bucky Barnes ever dropped by for birthday parties or barbecues, never sifted through the suitcase of old spy technology and laughed wistfully over the fun they’d had. They didn’t tease Antoine’s mom because they’d known her when she was little, didn’t take photographs that aged just a little more every year, didn’t make him sit through the latest TV retelling of the Captain America story and pick holes in all of it. They weren’t there to grow old and grow families and watch their lives become legend: they were long, long gone, and the gaps they left behind grew wider every year.

It was at the end of one of the terrible Captain America movies, when Liv Tyler playing Peggy Carter was sobbing into a communication device and Keanu Reeves in a terrible blonde wig was crashing into the ice, when Antoine finally asked his grandfather: “do you think that he’s dead?”

He didn’t say anything for so long that Antoine thought that he’d upset him, was scrabbling for childish words to apologise, when his granddad finally said: “I don’t think any of us really believe he’s gone. I think he’ll be back, when we need him.”

His granddad didn’t live to see 9/11, and Antoine spent the next few weeks pretending he wasn’t waiting for something that never happened, that _obviously_ was never going to happen.

It’s too early for there to reports about what’s happened inside the ship; if there’s a perfectly frostbitten corpse in there, if it’s empty, if there’s something nobody anticipated inside. Steve Rogers vanished under the ice a lifetime ago, and there’s probably nothing much to find.

Antoine drives home to his mom anyway, because sometimes there are some things you just have to do.

**viii.**

“You’re an idiot,” Sharon says. Her voice sounds small and far away, and somewhere someone is probably monitoring this conversation.

“And you’re the one with the boring-ass desk job,” Antoine reminds her. 

“That’s relative,” Sharon replies, amusement in her tone. “I’ll clock off in an hour and a half, go back to my apartment with the insanely nice water pressure, have a hot shower and some pyjamas and something to eat in front of the television. Whereas you’re going to be sleeping tonight in a soggy ditch with a sprained wrist and a bunch of men who haven’t washed for the last week.”

“Actually, I’m on watch tonight, I’m not going to be sleeping at all,” Antoine says.

“Mmmm, and I’ve got those lovely high threadcount sheets,” Sharon muses, deliberately smug-sounding. “All soft and cosy and clean.”

“Okay,” Antoine says, laughing, “okay, right now, you’ve got the better end of the deal. I don’t even remember the last time I got to put on clean underwear.”

“And now you see why I chose to work out of the field,” Sharon sing-songs.

Antoine grins, rueful. “I bet I’m having more fun than you are.”

“Did you know the computers here block facebook?” Sharon asks. “I’ve got actual hackers here who still can’t get it to load.”

“What’re you going to do with _facebook_?” Antoine asks, glancing over his shoulder to make sure they’re all still in position, it’s not time to move out yet. “Your entire life is classified.”

“I like the fake life I have on there,” Sharon responds. “I have three cats, a quirky best friend called Mindy who works in pharmaceuticals, and I’m expecting a promotion any day now in my dull yet rewarding job in HR.”

The idea of Sharon working in HR makes Antoine snort before he can stop himself. “Do you have a perfect boyfriend too?”

“I have a cute neighbour with a labrador,” Sharon says. “We have meetcutes on the stairs a lot and one time we folded laundry together.”

“Well,” Antoine says, “that’s… sickening. How about actual you; anything since-”

“That Night We Do Not Speak Of? No,” Sharon cuts him off. “It’s not like I have a whole lot of time for socialising.”

The Night They Do Not Speak Of involved a bottle of tequila and Brock Rumlow, from what Sharon sheepishly admitted over takeout and rosé the last time Antoine was home. His own sex life is even worse than Sharon’s, since he’s never anywhere for a long period of time and when he gets a night of downtime he usually spends it asleep, tragic as that is.

“Trip, it’s an encrypted line back to base, not a sex line,” Garrett tells him, smacking him on the shoulder. “C’mon, it’s nearly time for dinner.”

“Roger that, sir,” he responds, and waits until Garrett’s moved away enough for him to drop his voice for a: “you’re okay, though, yeah?”

“I am.” Sharon’s voice is fond and maybe a little sad, and he hears the _I miss you_ neither of them will say.

“Good,” he says, and: “be safe.”

He cuts the call before she can reply, pulls a grin together, and turns back to where his team are hulking around protein packs. Ah, the glamour of espionage.

ix.

Every single phoneline that could connect him to Sharon goes dead within minutes of the world going to shit. Even with his own personal hells to deal with, Antoine doesn’t stop trying to contact her, trying to find _someone_ he knows who isn’t dead. Sharon replies to nothing, and neither does anybody else; helicarriers crash into Washington and Nick Fury is dead and every coded message they ever created, every dead drop email address, comes up blank.

By the time things calm down enough for Antoine to try and look for Sharon, he’s pretty certain that she’s dead. She wouldn’t be HYDRA, he knows, he _knows_ that, if he knows nothing else he knows that, and that means that she’s dead. He considers going to Peggy Carter’s home first; it’s been a long time since he last visited, but he’s sure the nurses would remember him and maybe let him through – unless Peggy’s had security stepped up too, and _fuck_ , having the rug torn out from under his feet never gets better, never makes more sense. Betrayal after betrayal, and in between, blood and blood and more blood.

Sharon was undercover keeping an eye on Steve Rogers last time he checked in; she was giggly and eye-rolling in equal measure, snarking _of_ course _they’d pick me for this_ down the phone, and he found himself wondering if this would be the next historical relationship Sharon ended up recreating, before he felt bad for thinking like that and reminded himself it was none of his business these days anyway. From what he’s heard, though, that cover is blown to hell and back, and neither Rogers nor Sharon live in that building anymore, and he heads for the apartment Sharon’s lived in since she graduated, unless an assignment sent her somewhere else. Small, neat, and utterly hers. 

Antoine doesn’t know if he’s going there as a last-ditch attempt to find her alive, or if he just wants to find a memento before what’s left of SHIELD arrives to wipe her home clean. Well. Maybe they won’t; Antoine is part of all that’s left of SHIELD, after all.

He sits in his unmarked car across the road from her apartment block for hours, black coffee and the radio on down low and every stakeout detail he’s ever done, except they never made his heart pound like this, his hands shake. He sees a few people go in and out, but none of them are Sharon. He waits, long enough for sunset to dip and for people with day jobs to come home, and then slips in behind one of her neighbours, smiling blandly until they shrug and let him go upstairs without asking any questions.

Sharon’s apartment door is neat, no obvious signs that anyone’s broken in or picked the lock lately, and Antoine considers it all for a few heartbeats before he picks the lock himself. Sharon would have given him keys, they both know that, but she changed her lock regularly as per SHIELD guidelines, and he was never home long enough to merit getting a new set. Even with the extra reinforcement most SHIELD agents’ doors have, it doesn’t take long for him to get inside, hands steady, mouth dry.

Sharon stands in the centre of her living room, feet planted, gun aimed straight at him.

Antoine feels his whole body go weak with relief.

“I guessed something like this would happen,” Sharon says, and flicks off the safety.

Antoine raises his hands. “Are you kidding me?” he asks.

“John Garrett was HYDRA,” Sharon replies steadily, hands firm around the gun. Her voice isn’t cracking, but her eyes are too bright.

“He was,” Antoine agrees. “But I’m not.”

Sharon swallows, and Antoine thinks one or both of them are about to break down in a noisy and embarrassing fashion. He stands his ground, keeps his hands raised in a position of surrender.

“Sharon,” he says quietly.

“ _Everyone_ turned out to be HYDRA,” Sharon tells him. “My close colleagues, my friends, people I’d nod to in the breakroom, people I’d slept with, people who’d patched me up in the infirmary, my fucking Academy _roommate_.”

Antoine knows. God, does he know.

“Can you imagine if I’d turned out to be working for HYDRA?” he asks. “My mom would _kill me_.”

Sharon lets out something that’s a cross between a laugh and a sob; she puts the safety back on the gun and then it’s hitting the floor and Sharon’s hugging him like she thinks he’s going to vanish any second. Antoine hugs her back, pressing his face into her hair, and it’s entirely possible that both of them are crying right now. It’s been a handful of days, but it feels like a lifetime; everything’s gone, _everything_. 

“I’m sorry,” Sharon says thickly into his chest. “I know, I know you’re not HYDRA, but Garrett-”

“I’d’ve doubted me too,” Antoine tells her. “But hey, next time, maybe don’t let me think you’re dead?”

His voice is shaking like it hasn’t since this whole thing began, and he’s not sure he could let go of her now even if he _wanted_ to.

“It was a dick move,” Sharon agrees, and she tries something like a smile. “I’m- thank you. For coming here.”

“Like I’d go anywhere else,” he replies. “And I need your help.”

Sharon stands up a little straighter. “Anything,” she says. “Whatever you’ve got yourself into, I can help, we can get you out of it.”

“Great,” Antoine says. “‘Cause I need you to help me tell my mom that I used all of the old Howling Commandos stuff on a mission against HYDRA and I can’t bring it home after all.”

“Fuck.” Sharon bursts into shaky laughter. “No, no, I can’t help you with that, you’re on your own.”

“Kind of thought I might be,” Antoine says, and doesn’t let her go.

**x.**

The aftermath isn’t as bad as Antoine thought it might have been, once upon a time, with his team dying and his world in pieces. He still has a job, he still has SHIELD left to cling to, and his mom looked sort of pleased and sort of angry when he brought her home an empty suitcase and a guilty expression.

“Your grandfather would be proud,” she told him tearily, hugging him, while the TV announced that SHIELD were terrorists and everything was still going to shit.

Antoine has a new team, not everyone’s as dead as advertised, and he has a new apartment that’s hopefully HYDRA-proof, if he ever gets around to going home and not loitering around worrying about Fitz or helping Skye out on the new shooting range. Yeah, okay, he’s a little bit scared that if he turns his back, then SHIELD will crack and there’ll be nothing left to go back to. He thinks he’s probably not the only one feeling this way, if the sheer amount of time everyone spends in their base is anything to go by. Sometimes he’s not even sure he remembers what daylight actually looks like.

Sharon’s moved too; both apartments and organisations.

“I can’t believe you joined the goddamn _CIA_ ,” Antoine groans. “I mean, the CIA, Sharon. Why not just get a big t-shirt saying Fuck You, SHIELD on it?”

“I already have one,” Sharon says drily, “it’s in the wash.”

“You should come back,” he tries, because yeah, Coulson sent out messages to the agents who weren’t dead or brainwashed or completely traumatised, but this is considerably more personal. This is _him_. “We can finally be on a team. You can be my handler, or whatever.”

“It’s not a phone sex line, Trip,” Sharon says, light and teasing, but her smile is sad.

He pinches the bridge of his nose. “So, you’re saying you won’t come back.”

“I’m saying I _can’t_ come back,” Sharon counters. “Antoine, you weren’t _there_. You lost your team, and I’m sorry, but… I was in the middle of it. Everyone around me, hundreds of people, either died or betrayed me, all at once. Everyone. And I know Nick Fury wants me to be the new Peggy, help build a new SHIELD, but I won’t.”

Antoine sighs, and then her words register. “…you know Nick Fury’s alive?” he says warily.

Sharon rolls her eyes, and her smile finally looks half real. “Please,” she says, “I probably knew before you did.”

Antoine considers Peggy Carter and Sharon Carter and legacies and what that even means nowadays. “Yeah,” he agrees, you probably did.”

Sharon kicks at his ankle. “For what it’s worth,” she says, “I really am sorry. I was kind of hoping it’d just be Fury, and Coulson’s email, and I wouldn’t have to say no to you in person.”

Antoine manages to smile back. “Hey,” he says, “I get it. And we’ll be okay, you know.”

“I know,” Sharon replies, voice heavy with meaning, and Antoine thinks again about Peggy Carter and Nick Fury and levels and levels of secrets.

“How much _do_ you know?” he asks suddenly.

Sharon flutters her eyelashes at him. “Hey,” she says, “I left the shadowy organisation where we all lied to each other. Let me hang on to _some_ mystery.”

Antoine rolls his eyes. “Don’t be a stranger, yeah?”

Sharon reaches to link their fingers together; brief and sweet and the one thing that hasn’t ever changed. “As if I could.”


End file.
